Lincoln and religion

[Mike B.]

I believe Lincoln made comments about the age of Niagra Falls and was a fan of Volney's "Ruins" that he believed the earth was quite old and did not accept the literal 6 days of creation of the earth in Genesis. The scientific consensus now is the earth is around 4.5-4.6 billion years old.

As far as Predestination and evolution there is a wonderful exchange here from the late Stephen Jay Gould and another professor on this. In the Rocky Mountains one part of a mountain fell down leaving a very good record of evolution over millions of years.

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/n...brian.html

Gould believes that if one re-ran the tape as it were and ran it forward evolution would have been totally different and the fossils in the shale would have went different ways and we would not exist.

Simon Conway Morris says the opposite. He says that the conditions of life and the earth would have made evolution follow partiular lines, such as the idea that the evolution of the eye through natural selection would follow a particular pattern because it is the efficent organ necessary with the light of the sun.

As far as dinos are concerned they existed for millions of years and were most likely wiped out by commets as they disappear from the geological record at about 65 million years ago.